Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Tag Archives: Just Survive

Maybe. It is hard to tell. But I’m running out of pithy three word titles to track its progress. The next round will be “Shall” and “Shan’t” I guess, then after that I’ll have to figure something else out.

Anyway, Daybreak announced that they would be shutting down Just Surviveback in August, giving people two months notice of the event. I wrote a bit of a eulogy for the game back then.

The night is dark, and some will go quietly into it…

Then, about a week and a half back, Jace Hall said on a live stream that NantG Mobile, the joint venture between Daybreak and NantWorks, was working on a way to bring Just Survive over to be re-integrated into H1Z1… now called Z1 Battle Royale… as a PvE play mode for the game, which would close the circle as the two titles were originally one back when this whole thing started.

Anyway, pending that, Just Survive would remain up, if mostly untended. The phrase “maintenance mode” was used on the stream, though I remain unsure how that would be different that the previous six month of the game’s life.

Not fully exposed, but not covered either

However, as Massively OP reported yesterday, Jace Hall apparently hadn’t checked things out fully with the Daybreak side of things, as they issued the following statement yesterday at 10:45am.

As we announced back in August, we’ve made the difficult decision to sunset Just Survive on Wednesday, October 24 at 11 a.m. PT. All game servers will be coming offline at that time, and the game will no longer be available for play.

While this chapter for Just Survive has come to an end, we are discussing the possibility of allowing our partner and developer of Z1 Battle Royale, NantG Mobile, to bring Just Survive back online and take over development of the game sometime in the future. Should we have further information to share regarding that matter, we’ll be sure to inform you accordingly.

Thank you again for the countless hours of fun across Pleasant Valley and Badwater Canyon – we appreciate your support and dedication to Just Survive.

Best,

The Just Survive Team at Daybreak Games

The note leaves open the possibility of the game being revived at some future date by NantG Mobile, but it appears that Daybreak isn’t going to leave the servers up until that happens. And so we say good-bye for now.

This move seems to leave Daybreak with just four games, all from the SOE era, the newest of which is six years old already, while the oldest is going to turn 20 next March:

EverQuest (1999)

EverQuest II (2004)

DC Universe Online (2011)

PlanetSide 2 (2012)

Gone from the list are Just Survive and H1Z1, which is now being run by NantG Mobile under the new name Z1 Battle Royale. Daybreak may be getting some revenue from the latter, but it doesn’t seem to be their game anymore. Of course, that bring up the whole question as to what is the real, legal relationship between Daybreak and NantG Mobile, but somehow I doubt we’re going to get details on that any time soon.

There was little in the way of shock or surprise when, back in August, Daybreak announced that their long neglected zombie horror title, Just Survive, was going to go dark on October 24.

The night is dark and full of dead SOE games

The gaming world moved on without so much as a ripple.

Then in early September came the announcement that Daybreak and NantWorks would be creating some sort of joint venture, NantG Mobile, to reboot the battle royale title H1Z1 in some way in which we might end up with a new Windows version of the game, along with a mobile version, under the name Z1 Battle Royale.

Also, EverQuest might be involved somehow.

The whole thing was more than a bit opaque as people tried to piece together all the things mentioned and the parties in play, which included, among other things, the LA Times and some sort of esports event center.

Left out of all of that however was Just Survive. It was not part of the deal. It was still dead.

Only now it might be part of the deal. Maybe. Could be. If things align.

There is nothing set in stone yet, but it could happen and, in anticipation of that, Just Survive will be put in some sort of “maintenance mode,” though I dare you to tell me how that differs from the support mode the game has been in for the last year, until the details can be worked out. But the idea is to move Just Survive back into H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… as a play mode for the game.

Jace Hall seemed mostly concerned about the skin situation and not diluting the skin market in H1Z1, from which I took that there is a skin market in H1Z1 and not much more.

So Just Survive might carry on. I am sure this is a ray of hope to the small but dedicated fan base that follows the game.

The follow on conversation also seems to makes clear that Daybreak and the joint venture NantG Mobile are two completely separate entities, so it sounds very much like NantG Mobile it trying to figure out how to get Just Survive from Daybreak in a way that makes financial sense all around.

Of course, that just brings up more questions in my mind as to what this means for EverQuest and any future title in that domain, as that was clearly mentioned back in the original NantG Mobile announcement.

Remember, as Jace Hall said slowly and clearly on the stream, Just Survive is not a done deal yet.

Daybreak Games announced today that the rather aptly named game Just Survive won’t survive though to the end of the year. It is set to close down on October 24, 2018, after which it will be just another entry on the list of SOE/Daybreak games that once were.

The night is dark, I think I’ll go to bed

The message from Daybreak, quoted here since the site it is on will no doubt disappear with the game itself.

Dear Survivors,

After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to sunset Just Survive on Wednesday, October 24 at 11 a.m. PT. The excitement of the game’s promise was palpable and its loyal community is still full of ideas for its future. Unfortunately, we are no longer in a position to fulfill its greatness and the current population of the game makes it untenable to maintain.

Just Survive was part of our first Early Access project, and we learned a great deal during its development. As with any open world game, the greatest stories came from our passionate players. From the incredibly skilled base builders to the free-ranging gangs, and all of the players named variations of “ImFriendly” and “PleaseDontShootMe”, we hope everyone had amazing adventures across Pleasant Valley and Badwater Canyon.

Thank you for taking the time to play the game, to help test it when we opened the Test servers to the public, and for all of the suggestions and feedback throughout Early Access. We truly appreciate everyone’s commitment and your contributions throughout the development process. Our promise is to do better and learn from every experience along the way.

Just Survive servers will remain available for play until Wednesday, October 24 at 11 a.m. PT, and starting immediately all Steam purchases and in-game transactions have been disabled. To find out if you are eligible for a refund via Steam, please visit this link.

Thank you again for your support and dedication to Just Survive.

Best,

The Just Survive Team at Daybreak Games

The original game, built up from PlanetSide 2, rolled up under the H1Z1 name back at the beginning, was announced back in April of 2014 with the bizarre promise that this zombie apocalypse, horror survival title was “dedicated to Star Wars Galaxies players.” I know some people still trying to figure that last bit out. The details about the game, available at that link, at first included the idea of it being free to play and available to SOE All Access subscribers. Indeed.

H1Z1 went into Early Access in January of 2015 to much acclaim.

Okay, maybe not. It was a bit of a disaster, not helped by then CEO Smed forgetting that gamers can’t take a joke… or that you shouldn’t insult your customer base quite so brazenly… or something. Anyway, it brought up the whole idea of what we should expect out of paid early access and went some way, along with Landmark, towards setting the poor reputation the concept has. It got Polygon to declare if a company was charging for a game then it was fair to review it as it stood.

I kind of miss Smed for quotes alone. You never got Russ Shanks on Twitter after Smed was gone.

Anyway, as we were to soon lean, SOE was about to be split from Sony and become Daybreak Games, so rushing the title out the door was probably part of the plan to please the new masters in San Diego.

As time went on the game got better. I went and played it a bit with people from the Reavers SIG from the Imperium in EVE Online. It was clearly a game for groups, but it had its moments.

You use your clothes to make a bag right away, because inventory management!

There was even some bonus items for signing up through the then-branded TheMittani.com.

The machete was the clincher

However, the Battle Royale option that was put into the game became the hit aspect of the whole thing, the driving force that sold something like a million copies of the game and kicked off the whole Battle Royale genre.

When it became obvious where the money was for the title, the Battle Royale portion was split off into its own game, giving us two titles, H1Z1: Just Survive and H1Z1: King of the Kill.

There was some later work on those titles, with the former becoming Just Survive and the latter going through some gyrations before returning to just H1Z1.

You missed one I think…

While H1Z1 has ridden some highs, first dominating then losing the Battle Royale market to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite, then getting a boost again on the PlayStation 4… if only you’d stayed with Sony… the other side of the house appeared to be struggling to live up to its name. Just Survive was mostly a black hole of information. I pegged it to be declared in “maintenance mode” by the end of this year while some wild rumors from earlier this year said it was on its last legs.

And here we are today. I was a bit too optimistic in my prediction. How can you tell when something at Daybreak is in maintenance mode after all? The traditional cycle there, carried over from the SOE days, is moments of enthusiasm followed by long, long stretches of dead silence.

Daybreak Games now has the following titles:

EverQuest (1999)

EverQuest II (2004)

DC Universe Online (2011)

PlanetSide 2 (2012)

H1Z1 (2015)

Those titles are all effectively SOE era work. There have been improvements and expansions onto consoles and the like, but there hasn’t really been anything new in the Daybreak era. Not much of a legacy after almost four years.

Because we just can’t stop staring at Daybreak now that they’ve drawn our attention.

The eye seems more angry today

Over at Massively OP they reported on a Reddit post by an alleged former Daybreak staffer who was part of the big layoff and who decided to spilled the beans on what the company has under wraps. I am going to quote the substance of the post just to have it here for reference now and in the future.

The list re-ordered for narrative flow and importance to me:

Everquest will have one last expansion. The 20th anniversary will introduce a series of nostalgic raids that tie into complex quests. These quests can be done in order to grant alternate characters powerful scaling weapons.

Well, I have long asked how many expansions could EverQuest sustain. 20 years is a pretty good run, and I imagine that they’ll keep playing the progression server card. But it will be a sad day when the final expansion hits and Norrath reaches its final size.

Everquest 2 will also have one last expansion and eventually a similar series of send-off weapon quests and raids.

It seems like 2019 (or 2018) will be a final kiss-off for the slowly dwindling and increasingly bitter base of Norrath fans. EQII will have made it to 15 years but won’t end up with nearly the immense scope of places that EQ has. Another sad day for the MMO with my favorite housing scheme ever.

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

I guess we should be happy about this, but after the first EverQuest Next announcement, then the restart, then the voxel word promises and Landmark and the faked AI in all the demos and the final cancellation I cannot find any enthusiasm for this at the moment.

There was a rumor going about last year that there was a Norrath based multiplayer RPG in the works that would not be an MMORPG, but I guess once you are on the stage with the other MMOs it is hard not to keep going that direction.

The idea of competing with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen AND injecting the flavor of the month feature of battle royale PvP seems silly. Would picking a focus be too much to ask? And what would team battle royal PvP be anyway, and how would it be different from World of Warcraft battlegrounds?

I realize this isn’t an official announcement, but they have a lot to sell on this one if it is anywhere close to true.

Just Survive is on its last legs. Several ideas for increasing profits have been floated around but at this point it looks like a sunset is most likely.

Not unexpected. Certainly the most credible item on the list. The name seemed too on the nose when it was given, like naming a mayfly “dead by Friday.”

Planetside 2 was supposed to be getting new character models and animations in May. A new map and an aircraft carrier are planned for the end of the year.

Sounds okay I guess, unless you’re planning to replace the game.

Planetside 3 is in early development. Other teams will be siphoned into this project next year. This will be a team based battle royal game that combines the building aspect of Fortnite with territory acquisition.

Oh, you’re planning to replace the game. The ghost of Smed continues to wander the halls of Daybreak I guess, which is odd because he isn’t actually dead. And, of course, battle royale figures into it because of course it does. Doesn’t Daybreak already have a battle royale game in H1Z1?

H1Z1 will get a smaller map as well as a remake of “Z1”. The PS4 port is looking good. After that new skins will continue to be released but most of the team will be moved over to Planetside 3.

Drop work on the current battle royale game save for cash shop items so you can work on the new battle royale game, which will probably launch when the market has gone well past saturation and will have to be altered to fit whatever the flavor of the month is at that time.

Well, down 70 people and with a handful of games to maintain I guess they have to make some tough choices if they ever want to launch anything new.

Of course, this could all be nonsense or misdirection too. You can’t really know from the outside. But I figured I would mark the moment so we can return to it later and see if any of it plays out.

I doubt there will be any official response to any of this, but we’ll all keep an eye out for announcements in the distant future from the house that Jason Epstein built.

I was thinking about Daybreak over the weekend. It has been about two and a half years now since they ceased to be SOE and began living the “indie” lifestyle as Daybreak. Freed from the shackles of their PlayStation overlords there was the promise of being able to do new things… mostly on XBox.

Profitable on PlayStation, DCUO was the beneficiary of the whole “we can develop for XBox!” plan, getting an XBox One client last year along with the promise of being able to play on servers with Windows players. I can’t recall if that ever happened. The game does get regular content updates and likely continues to be profitable.

EverQuest and EverQuest II

The foundation of the company. I remain of the opinion I expressed on a podcast a year and and a half ago, that these two titles are in the strongest place they have been in a long time. Both games get yearly content expansion and regular updates and Daybreak has continued to successfully play the nostalgia card with both titles, rolling out fresh servers focused on old content. Those are consistently the most popular servers though even I, a big fan of the idea, wonder how long these titles can live largely on that sort of thing.

H1Z1 – King of the Kill

The surprise break-out battle royale aspect of the H1Z1 saga, it still hasn’t managed to exit Early Access despite Daybreak’s parent company considering the game launched 30 months ago. And there is a question as to how long its reign of success will last now that PlayerUnknown’s Battleground is now the darling of battle royale titles and Twitch streamers. You cannot live on selling $5 in-game hoodies when a new game is stealing your audience.

Yeah, who owns Battle Royale now?

Having to differentiate yourself from your new competitor… which has sold 10 million units already… is never a good sign. Meanwhile, the promised ports to PlayStation and XBox have never materialized.

Just Survive

The aptly named twin of King of the Kill and once the main focus of the plan. Then the battle royale idea proved more popular, the game was split into two titles, with Just Survive mostly neglected for the next year and a half. The biggest announcement during that time was that Daybreak was removing the “H1Z1” prefix from the title. That came with the promise of a big revamp, but I don’t know if that will be enough to undue the damage from the time of neglect, which has left a recent legacy of “mostly negative” reviews for the game.

PlanetSide 2

The successor to PlanetSide and Smed’s favored child, it is hard to gauge how well it is doing in the post-Smed era. It continues to get balance changes and updates. On the other hand, almost two years back the Daybreak was saying that the title was having problems on the revenue generation front. When you’re giving it away for free and not charging to play the core of the game, people will take advantage of that, a business model that remains the same today. Has this gotten any better?

Something New?

The above is just the way things go with titles that are on the market and have to survive over time. Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.

What differentiates a going concern from a company just riding out its end days and milking its current titles is ongoing development of new games. And I haven’t seen any of that from Daybreak. Moving one five year old title to XBox was nice, but hardly a substitute for new work.

All six titles in the Daybreak lineup come from the SOE era. H1Z1 might have gone into early access shortly after the Daybreak deal, but it was announced and work was in progress well before then.

The only thing new under the sun for Daybreak has been a deal with Standing Stone Games to handle some aspect of LOTRO and DDO operations. But that is hardly a substitute for new work, especially since SSG is a company clearly riding out its own end game scenario. No matter how much money Daybreak is getting from that deal, it clearly has an expiration date.

So is this what the Daybreak experience is going to be? A long ride into the sunset shepherding an ever dwindling stable to titles onward until the last one drops?